


A Beautiful Lie

by st_aurafina



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5502629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/pseuds/st_aurafina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first lie that Lucy ever told was to John. He engineered it for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Beautiful Lie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kultiras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kultiras/gifts).



> Thank you to my beta.

The first lie that Lucy ever told was to John. He engineered it for her. 

Lucy's computer core was a beautiful thing but huge for such a small ship, spanning the breadth of her frame. Johnny hung suspended in the middle of it, with the bridge above him and the loading bay a fatal drop below. He trusted his harness, though, and propped himself by his knees against the main processor unit. It currently served as a workbench while he sorted through chips and nanocircuit modules. 

He clicked modules into position and activated them. One by one they lit up with a gentle purple glow. "How's that feel, Lucy?" 

"John, I am unsure how your question can be answered. I'm afraid I cannot detect a difference." 

Johnny pushed back in his harness. "Okay, we'll field test it. Lie to me, gorgeous." 

There was a studied silence, then Lucy spoke. "I don't understand, John. Can you be more specific?" 

Well, that hadn't worked, not yet. "Hang on, Luce, I'll try something different." Johnny had been researching a workaround for Lucy's RAC-mandated integrity protocol since they'd docked yesterday.

"It will be really handy," he'd reasoned with Dutch. They hadn't been working together long, but Dutch had already seen Johnny's knack with things mechanical and given him free rein over Lucy's operating systems. "Imagine the places we'll be able to get into, if Lucy could do things like convince an admission server that her codes are valid, or initiate non-standard handshake access?" 

Dutch had been cleaning her boots; the last warrant was messier even than she liked. "The reason the RAC uses all of those security datagrams is so that AIs don't do exactly those things, Johnny. It's going to stand out." 

She sat cross-legged on the floor holding a boot, watching him twist a spanner around and around nervously. Her hands pushed a piece of wire methodically through each eyelet in the leather boot she held. The fact that she did this without looking would have surprised most people – it had surprised Johnny, when she first took him on – but he was used to seeing extreme physical adeptness by now. Dutch was amazing. 

"It's weird, though," said Dutch. "Because whenever we've needed to fake our way for a warrant, you've always been able to hack us a doorway. Why are you suddenly keen to give Lucy the ability to go shady when you can do it yourself?" 

Johnny shrugged. "Just thought it might be useful for her to use her brains and not be tied down by the law." He couldn't tell her that he had realised mid-mission that Lucy was artificially gagged, and the idea was revolting to him. You don't throw collars on intelligent entities; it was morally and ethically wrong. 

Dutch would crack herself up laughing if she knew he was thinking about ethics; Johnny Jaqobis was surely not any kind of philosopher. It was just wrong, and that made him want to fix it. 

"Well, don't do anything that'll get a warrant out on us, okay?" Dutch took her boots and headed to her bunk. A few moments later, Johnny heard the shower. 

He'd had to wait until Dutch next took shore leave. He was pretty sure that 'shore leave' was her euphemism for sexy times, since they were docked at Old Town and shore leave was technically a single step off the gangway, but he knew she wouldn't be back for at least a day. The minute the hatch closed, he grabbed his harness and disappeared into the computer core. 

That big orange unit, the RAC-installed behaviour modulator, was the thing that stopped Lucy from falsifying data, and it was compulsorily installed into every ship running a RAC team. It was easy enough to evade the tamperproof security, but the modulator itself was laminated into place, a piece of etched palladium covered in two inches of resin. Preferentially, Johnny would bypass it rather than cut into the thing. Much better to leave it in situ. He upscaled the power draw again, and locked the new circuit in place. 

"How about now? Can you tell me something untrue, Lucy?" 

"I'm still not sure why you would want me to do that, John. Is this something you are able to do?" 

"Yeah, I guess," said John. "It's this weird human thing, and some people are better at it than others. I'm pretty bad. But Dutch? She can tell you your eyes are yellow and your hair is green, right to your face, and you'll believe every word."

"Does Dutch lie to me, John?" 

Johnny hung there, stumped. "I don't know, babe. Maybe? I guess she would, if it meant saving your hide. Or mine. Or hers." Last of all hers, because Dutch will spend her last breath to get her team home. When Dutch says she's got your back, it means she'll walk through bullets and on broken bones to bring you home safe. She expected the same of Johnny, but as long as he tried until he passed out, she forgave failure pretty easily.

"And why do you lie, John?" 

"Me?" Johnny blushed, startled by the personal question. "I don't actually lie all that much. Sometimes to spare someone's feelings, I guess. Maybe to impress someone, but that'll just get you into trouble. Trust me: I learned from experience." Thankfully, by the time he'd starting working with Dutch, he'd grown out of any urge to confabulate. She would have torn him to pieces for a laugh.

Lucy was quiet, digesting this new data. "I understand, John. So, you wish me to lie if you are in danger, or if you want your feelings spared." 

"Well, not exactly," said Johnny. "Though you can spare my feelings anytime; I won't complain about that. No, I'm hoping that you can fake a few codes, convince other systems that we're one thing when we're actually another. That sort of thing. Helpful lies. Lies that don't hurt anyone, but make it easier for us to bring in the warrant."

"Is that a lie, John?" 

John wasn't sure if he heard a touch of hurt in Lucy's voice, or if he had the programmer's curse, anthropomorphism. "No!" he said, hurriedly. Did that sound defensive? Maybe it did. "Why do you think I'm lying, Lucy?" 

She replayed a conversation he had with Dutch months ago, after a warrant that had nearly gone bad. John heard himself speaking, in multiphonic sound that echoed through the computer core like a sermon. 

"I don't like the big guys pushing the little guys around, okay? It really gets my goat." On Lucy's crystal clear transmission, Johnny could hear the blood dripping from his nose and hitting the deck plating with sad little plinks. Oh, that had been a day. 

Johnny thought back. Was it his second warrant? Third? Early on with Dutch, the first week even. He'd picked an irrelevant fight (irrelevant to Dutch, anyway) with the pimp at a speakeasy far enough outside of Old Town that law enforcement was a joke. Dutch had to carry the warrant out herself, and then pull Johnny from a fistfight he was rapidly losing. 

"I know you know better than to turn your back on a target, so what the hell was that about?" she said, while he lay on the deck and felt sorry for himself. It would have been worse if she'd raised her voice or kicked him in the guts, but instead, Dutch looked bored. 

"He beat up on those kids; got them hooked on Jakk to keep them working for him!" Johnny, on the other hand, was plenty emotional. Outraged, even. 

Dutch stood over him, hands on her hips. "And you were going to do what? Adopt the lot of them? Move in and be their big brother? Every single one of those whores was ready for you to be their personal hero, John. Every night, they dream of a guy like you coming in to sweep them up and save them, and if you try to do that with every victim you meet, you will end up burned out and useless."

Johnny rolled over onto his side, so he didn't make pathetic bubbling noises when he breathed. "Doesn't mean I should walk away. It doesn't mean they don't deserve help."

She crouched down to look him in his rapidly swelling eyes. "I'll tell you something: as soon as we lifted off, someone else took over the job. Maybe they're better but more likely they're worse. I want you to learn two things if we're going to work out. One: the warrant is all. And two: the warrant is fucking all, Johnny, so keep your focus and follow the target. If you can't do that, we're not going to work out. My team is not for people who want to save the world." 

He'd learned a lot since then, he thought, deep in Lucy's computer core. "I didn't know you kept recordings of all our conversations," he said. He considered that for a while. "Lucy, why do you keep recordings of all our conversations?"

"To build baseline biometrics, John. In that conversation, despite your injuries, you showed a level heart rate, and no altered electro-dermal activity. You were telling the truth." 

"Well, yeah, I was. It was a stupid truth, though. Dutch was right." 

"Dutch was lying," said Lucy. "In the same timeframe as that conversation, she showed significant fluctuations in biometric data, to an extent that is normally only seen in moments of high arousal, such as attempting to deceive, experiencing strong emotion or physical stimulation." 

Johnny blushed, all squirmy inside at that kind of embarrassing detail. "Hey, don't tell me that; Dutch wouldn't want me to hear that stuff. I don't want to hear that stuff, either." 

He fussed with the circuit pieces, so that he didn't have to think about it, nearly dropped them all and cursed. Then, as he cupped the delicate components in his hand, something occurred to him. "Wait, you can detect lies? You understand what a lie is, but you can't tell one yourself?" Somehow, that seemed even crueller. He set his jaw, and pulled his microwelder from the toolkit. He might not be able to save everyone, but he could make this thing right. 

"John, why was Dutch lying?" 

Johnny hung in his harness for a moment, thinking. "What's Dutch's location right now, Lucy?" There was no way he was offering up pocket psychoanalysis if his boss was in earshot. 

"Dutch is currently on the second floor of an establishment registered as Bucking Boots and Bitches," said Lucy, as calmly merciless as only an AI can be.

Johnny blushed, picked up a probe and started isolating the behaviour modulator. "Okay, so, I'm not sure why, but Dutch has a sort of anti-White Knight syndrome," he said. "She gets all hinky about rescues, which is weird, because as far as I've seen, she does all her own rescuing." Dutch was a mystery to Johnny, and the chances of learning anything personal seemed fairly slim at this early stage of their partnership. 

"Are you trying to rescue me, John?" asked Lucy. 

Johnny caught his breath, so startled by the question that he didn't notice the small fire he had started on the circuit board in front of him. "I guess I am, Lucy. Or making it so you can come rescue me some time. Maybe I'm giving you the ability to make decisions about rescuing in general. Nobody should have to throw their lives away on a mission they didn't get a choice in." 

An hour later, slightly singed, he had managed to bypass the modulator, this time by running an external cable across the smooth orange chip. It was a dicey set-up. He wrapped the connection in extra insulation, in case it set him or the ship on fire. It was so phenomenally illegal that he was a little impressed with his own daring. 

"You going okay in there, Lucy? No adverse effects?" He had checked in with her every step of the way. He'd heard the horror stories about people who meddled with AIs' logic centres. You break a risk assessment algorithm and your ship takes a shortcut through a sun. You amp up the relative empathic interaction because you want your ship to talk sexy to you, and she drops the gangway in the middle of the night because a stranger asked nicely. It's all a matter of nuance.

"Yes, John. I believe I understand now." 

Delighted, he pushed away from the computer core, and hung, spinning, in mid-air. "Tell me something untrue, you beautiful machine." 

"Rescue will not always be a possibility," she said with certainty, and then she refused to play any longer. She had routines to run, diagnostics to issue. Johnny took the hint of defiance in her tone as a good thing, and hauled himself up to the bridge.

Later, as he was packing up and stowing equipment, he decided that he wasn't completely sure he'd achieved what he'd wanted. Then, he realised that if he didn't know, then a RAC inspector wouldn't either, and that was exactly the kind of ambiguity that Dutch would appreciate, when she got back from shore leave. Whatever he had done for Lucy, he hoped that she would be able to make her own decisions. He'd learned that you don't start rescuing other people until you knew you could save yourself.


End file.
